Zhuqi Li will present his General Exam on Wednesday, January 9, 2019 at 10am in CS 402. The members of his committee are Kyle Jamieson (adviser), Jennifer Rexford, and Wyatt Lloyd. Everyone is invited to attend his talk, and those faculty wishing to remain for the oral exam following are welcome to do so. His abstract and reading list follow below. Abstract: Conventional thinking treats the wireless channel as a given constraint. Therefore, wireless network designs to date center on the problem of the endpoint optimization that best utilizes the channel, for example, via rate and power control at the transmitter or sophisticated decoding mechanisms at the receiver. We instead explore whether it is possible to reconfigure the environment itself to facilitate wireless communication. In this work, we instrument the environment with a large array of inexpensive antennas (LAIA) and design algorithms to configure them in real time. Our system achieves this level of programmability through rapid adjustments of an on-board phase shifter in each LAIA device. We design a channel decomposition algorithm to quickly estimate the wireless channel due to the environment alone, which leads us to a process to align the phases of the array elements. Variations of our core algorithm can then optimize wireless channels on the fly for single- and multi-antenna links, as well as nearby networks operating on adjacent frequency bands. We design and deploy a 36-element passive array in a real indoor home environment. Experiments with this prototype show that, by reconfiguring the wireless environment, we can achieve a 24% TCP throughput improvement on average and a median improvement of 51.4% in Shannon capacity over the baseline single-antenna links. Over the baseline multi-antenna links, LAIA achieves an improvement of 12.23% to 18.95% in Shannon capacity. The book I am going to use is "Computer Networks: A Systems Approach 4th Edition" by Larry L. Peterson, Bruce S. Davie. The list of papers are: [1] Cerf, Vinton, and Robert Kahn. "A protocol for packet network intercommunication." IEEE Transactions on communications (1974) [2] Kung, Hsiang-Tsung, and John T. Robinson. "On optimistic methods for concurrency control." ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS) (1981) [3] Bharghavan, Vaduvur, et al. "MACAW: a media access protocol for wireless LAN's." ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review (1994) [4] Perry, Jonathan, et al. "Spinal codes." ACM SIGCOMM 2012 [5] Miu, Allen, Hari Balakrishnan, and Can Emre Koksal. "Improving loss resilience with multi-radio diversity in wireless networks." ACM MobiCom 2005. [6] Gollakota, Shyamnath, and Dina Katabi. Zigzag decoding: combating hidden terminals in wireless networks. ACM SIGCOMM 2008. [7] Liu, Vincent, et al. "Ambient backscatter: wireless communication out of thin air." NSDI. 2013. [8] Qiao, Yue, et al. "PhyCloak: Obfuscating Sensing from Communication Signals." NSDI. 2016. [9] Abari, Omid, et al. "Enabling High-Quality Untethered Virtual Reality." NSDI. 2017. [10] Xiong, Xi, et al. "Customizing indoor wireless coverage via 3D-fabricated reflectors." ACM BuildSys 2017.